A Second Chance For Ricky

February 08, 1985|By Ann Marie Lipinski.

Several years ago a boyhood friend of Ricky Hosea`s was paralyzed in a car accident and taken to the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago for therapy. Hosea visited him, and remembers thinking as he walked out of the building that houses so many tough cases: ``I hope I never end up here.``

Ten months later, Hosea was back at the institute, entering not as a visitor but as a patient, the victim of two drivers -- one hit-and-run and one drunk -- who hit him late one night on a Florida road.

``I was unconscious for more than four months and on a respirator,``

Hosea said. ``I had fractured my shoulders, collarbones, my arms and all but three of my ribs; both of my legs were broken, my hips were rotated and fractured, my pelvis was shattered, so was my jaw; I lost a lot of teeth. Let`s see. My urethra cord was severed, my kidneys were damaged, my left lung was punctured, I was paralyzed from the waist down. I was not supposed to live.``

``I saw no light at the end of the tunnel,`` said Jon Gice, a rehabilitation manager with St. Paul Fire & Marine, the company that provided Hosea`s workman`s compensation insurance. ``We basically had thrown in the towel on his recovery.``

On Feb. 1, two years and one week after his accident, Hosea -- who was not expected to walk again -- walked out of the Rehabilitation Institute with only the aid of leg braces and two wooden canes. He has rented an apartment near the institute and will continue as an out-patient with daily physical therapy, which he expects to complete in three months. He says eventually he will walk without canes. ``They are just a stepping stone.``

``He feels like such a part of the family, as if he had a job here,``

said an institute nurse on the morning Hosea was discharged. In fact, Hosea, who had lived at the institute as a patient for 17 months, would like to work there one day, helping patients who, like himself, are starting over.

``I would like to work with people as misfortunate as I was, to get them to the point where they`re as intact as I am now,`` he said. ``So many nights I wondered, `Why me?` but really never got an answer. Now I wonder why I got a second chance. I would like to do something with it.``